While currency experts are working on interchangeable currency platforms on an international scale, alternative currencies function as complements to support the local economy, not competitors with the national currency, which is currently more ubiquitously useful.

Marriage Ref, despite boasting big-name guests Julianne Moore and Ricky Gervais, scored just a 1.6 rating among 18-to-49-year-olds — a 20 percent drop from last year, when the show was ubiquitously promoted during the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

Coachella is perhaps the most important of these events, for a few core reasons, and provides the perfect ground zero for my annual state of the union on the landscape of our increasingly social and ubiquitously connected digital world.

This is particularly true when, in the same society -- as is true in contemporary America -- people are ubiquitously exposed to the very intoxicants whose use they are taught that they are incapable of controlling.